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The Size of Packets
October 2024 We've now been running packet-switched networks for many decades, and these days it's packets and not virtual circuits lie behind most of the world's digital communications service. But some very fundamental questions remain unanswered in this packet-switched world.
For the maximum packet size, Ethernet opted to head down the path of maximising carriage efficiency rather than sacrificing speed and capacity for the sake of preserving implicit data timing integrity. For a short period of time in the early 1990's it looked as it the next generation of local networks would use a 100Mbps token-ring architecture, called FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface). While the platforms continue to scale in terms of speed, it appears that the network stacks are reluctant to take on the agenda of effective and efficient path MTU discovery.
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